Red Tape Wire Service

It’s easy to focus on the big number associated with today’s Starwood breach — 500 million accounts compromised. But I’m focused on a much smaller number: 4. As in, hackers had access to Starwood networks for four years. In the world of “advanced persistent threats,” this sounds like some kind […]

Coffee giant Dunkin Donuts announced a security incident involving its mobile app yesterday, but I am afraid the firm isn’t telling quite the whole story. I’m hard at work trying to figure that out right now. The incident reminds me of what happened to Starbucks consumers, when criminals armed with […]

Google and Facebook often do spooky things, without our informed consent. Recently, Google seemed to possibly ruin a holiday surprise for me…but ended up breaking my heart instead. Here’s a story about a clever tech going too far, doing things I never asked it to do, and ultimately, making a […]

Internal Facebook documents seized by a member of British Parliament suggest Facebook was under siege from Russian hackers in late 2014. I can tell you Russian hackers were busy that year (as were Chinese hackers, and North Korean hackers, etc..) I spent months researching the hack of Yahoo — history’s […]

When did you give Facebook consent to share intimate details of your life with the rest of the world? To have your birthday shared with third-party apps, you political leanings shared with advertisers (and Russian fake news purveyors?) When you signed up, a firm executive said today during a testy […]

There’s a lot of noise around Facebook right now, and I suspect you’ll hear a lot more news soon. A member of parliament exercised an extraordinary power this weekend, seizing internal documents from the firm while one party to a lawsuit against Facebook was traveling in London. The British government is already […]

I’ve written many times that consumers have been hacked. Corporations with billion-dollar research budgets have poked and prodded us for decades, exposing every weakness, turning your human nature against you and exploiting that systematically. After reading this excellent Washington Post story about the spread of conspiracy theories online, I worry […]

People really don’t like being judged by machines. A wide majority of Americans say they worry algorithms will treat them unfairly when used to make judgments in crucial circumstances, such as during job interviews, parole proceedings, or financial transactions, according to a new survey released Friday by Pew Research Center. Algorithms […]

It’s the annual health care enrollment clusterf**k, which means it’s a perfect time for scammers to prey on confused consumers. And they are pouncing. YouMail, which tracks robocalls, says phony calls targeting consumers shopping for health insurance are the most common phone scam now. The firm counted 500 million such calls […]

Even after the vote is over, it’s not over. A critical element of democracy is that the losing side accepts the results. Think back to step 1: If an enemy of democracy could foment enough disenchantment that a sizable set of the population refuses to accept the legitimacy […]